A selection of quotes on writing your own way, in your own style, with your own writing voice.
Sincerity and Truth
1. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. ~ George Orwell
2 All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ~ Hemingway
3. Values are like fingerprints. Nobody’s are the same, but you leave ‘em all over everything you do ~ Elvis Presley
Going Your Own Way
4. If they give you ruled paper, write the other way ~ Juan Ramon Jimenez, quoted at the start of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
5. Every time you take the risk to be true to your own soul – whether or not you name your action as heroic – your example helps others to do likewise. When you notice this pattern, it becomes easier to have absolute fidelity to your own path without fear that doing so is selfish. We can do nothing better for others than model the authentic life. ~ Carol Pearson
Intention and Choice
6. Intention is what we wish to accomplish with our writing. Call it the writer’s soul. We can write to affirm and to celebrate, or we can write to debunk and to destroy; the choice is ours… Nobody can make us write what we don’t want to write. We get to keep intention. ~ William Zinsser, On Writing Well
Distinctive Voice
7. In life, finding a voice is speaking and living the truth. Each of you is an original. Each of you has a distinctive voice. When you find it, your story will be told. You will be heard ~ John Grisham